Withey: Veteran writer Annie Proulx urges wannabe authors to get a life

Canadian bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch (playing Ennis del Mar) performs during a January rehearsal of the Brokeback Mountain opera at the Teatro Real in Madrid, Spain.Gabriel Pecot
/ The Associated Press

EDMONTON - Annie Proulx was in the third grade when she first saw the word “melancholy” in print.

“It was the longest word I had ever seen in my life and I wasn’t the least bit sure how to pronounce it, so I ended up with something that sounded like meLEH-juLAHchee,” the 78-year-old American author told me recently in Seattle. “But I liked the look of the word. There was a lot to it. You felt like you had a steak of a word on your plate.”

That meaty 10-letter mystery lured Proulx into language, alphabets, the shapes of letters. And aren’t we grateful for it. Proulx’s body of work includes The Shipping News, a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994, and the short story Brokeback Mountain, a captivating, controversial love story about two gay cowboys in Wyoming, first published in The New Yorker in 1997 and later immortalized in Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning feature film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger.

Brokeback Mountain has also been adapted into an opera. Composed by Charles Wuorinen, it just premièred this January in Madrid, Spain. Calgary-raised bass baritone Daniel Okulitch played Ennis Del Mar opposite American tenor Tom Randle, as Jack Twist. Proulx herself wrote the libretto for the production, which forced her to revisit the tale and become a bit of a story surgeon. “I looked at it in a very medical kind of way, I had to dissect it and put it back together,” she said. “It was sitting down with scalpel and sutures.”

Proulx had never written operatic text but the form came to her quite naturally. “It was obvious that the sentences had to be short and singable, and since that’s the way the characters talked anyway, it was a natural thing to do,” she explained from a dark green easy chair whose high back curved around her torso. “It was quite easy and quite fun.”

The project took about six months, with Proulx and Wuorinen going back and forth over the finer details. “Every now and then, he’d go, no, that word’s not really singable at the end of a line.”

I spoke with Proulx at a posh townhouse in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighbourhood, where she is living temporarily. In April, she is moving to a rural area east of the city. I was surprised to learn the eminent writer had left Wyoming, her longtime home and the setting for much of her writing, including the 2011 memoir Bird Cloud, which centres on the jinxed construction of her dream house.

But Proulx is full of surprises, right down to her shimmery peach nail polish. Of switching genre with Bird Cloud, which had mixed reviews, Proulx sounded almost regretful. “I probably shouldn’t have published it. I probably should have tossed it in a drawer somewhere.” Her legions of fans would disagree. Proulx is at work on a new novel now, themed around the slow but steady loss of trees in North America. The story starts at the tail end of the 17th century, in Quebec, and travels around the continent until the present day.

The ongoing links between the author and Canada continue to intrigue and delight. Proulx’s father was French-Canadian, and the author spent time living in Montreal. The Shipping News is set in Newfoundland. The tale of Brokeback resonated in Alberta, and the film was shot here in the Rockies. I, like many Albertans, felt I had a stake in the film’s success, felt tethered to the story, geographically, culturally, both. At the Academy Awards in 2006, I was gutted when Brokeback failed to nab the golden statuette for best picture.

I spoke to Proulx because she was one of the featured authors this year at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, the biggest of its kind on this continent. The word-nerd extravaganza drew some 12,000 gung-ho writers, readers and editors under the shadow of the Space Needle for a glut of seminars, readings and talks by authors of stature.

“I was kind of amazed to hear there were a vast number of persons who were writers that came,” Proulx told me. She’s done many a literary festival, but has never spoken at such a huge literary conference.

That sense of amazement applies as easily to the participants as it does the presenters. The AWP conference was motivating and educational, but demoralizing, too. On the one hand, it’s cool for emerging writers to know they’re not alone in their struggle to make art out of chaos with the written word. On the other hand, being reminded just how many others are out there trying to accomplish the very same thing can make a gal feel pretty puny and deflated.

In Seattle, a sea of scribes and wannabe scribes flowed up and down the escalators in the convention centre. It was all tweed and tights and artfully shaved sections of scalp, florid skirts and knitted neck loops, facial expressions the perfect mix of thoughtful, quirky and dogged behind hip eyeglasses.

Some were shy, others gushed about their favourite novelists, poets. “And I was, like, Frank Bidart does selfies?!” In sessions, there were affirming mmmms and nods and clucks whenever a speaker said something particularly bang-on. The place hummed with lit lingo — process and prompts, authenticity and antimemoir, ruminations on “the I” and “the why” and “the now what” — as well as delicious, ridiculous lines like “I am congenitally incapable of writing in a linear fashion” and “If there’s a dog in your book, oh my GAWD you’ll sell so well!”

Oh crud. Is there a dog in my book?

At times, OK often, I found myself squirming with self-doubt and bafflement, rolling my eyes at the pretentiousness of it all, the game of it all, the fashion show of it all, the business of it all. And this wave of meLEH-juLAHchee would wash over me. The whole scene also had me thinking, yeah, great, we’ve all got a story to tell. And thanks to epublishing, anybody, everybody, can publish. But who will consume it all, especially when everyone is ostensibly too busy to read?

“There are just too many books but not enough readers,” said Proulx. The author learned her craft solely through reading, and is understably perplexed to have heard from instructors that students want to write, but don’t want to read. “That seems to me almost hysterically funny. How can they?”

Wilder still, she noted, is the attention lavished on young writers. “It’s madness. People who don’t really understand life or what happens, who have no experience outside a very very narrow range.” Older writers have “sharp eyes,” she said; it is they who ought to be supported and celebrated.

Of young people who want to write, Proulx did not mince words. “Get a life,” she said, her sharp eyes watching me take notes. “Get. A. Life. Live it. Later on, think about writing. Do something. Don’t sit down and write something out of the vacuum. Learn some languages, travel, read some books, learn how to cook, chop wood.”

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